Types of retailer schemes for electrical brands

The mainstream route to market runs: company → C&F / branch depot → authorised distributor → dealer → retailer / sub-dealer (the neighbourhood electrical shop) → electrician or contractor → consumer. In metro wholesale hubs — Bhagirath Palace in Delhi, Lohar Chawl in Mumbai — a wholesaler tier squeezes in between distributor and sub-dealer and feeds hundreds of small counters across the region.

Margins run at two speeds. House wire and flexible cable is a copper-indexed commodity with published price lists and discount structures every counter can quote from memory: distributors work on 3–5%, dealers on 4–7%, and the retailer / sub-dealer on 5–8% — before cash discounts for early payment. Switchgear, wiring accessories and lighting behave like consumer durables: counter margins of 15–30%, sensitive to display, demo and brand pull. The practical consequence: a 1% verified reward on wires is a 15–25% uplift in the counter's profit on your brand, while lighting schemes must compete with 25%+ margins a rival may simply dump into the market.

Copper adds a rhythm no other trade has. When LME copper trends up, dealers pre-stock and counters buy forward; when it falls, everyone destocks and waits. Schemes that ignore this cycle pay for purchases that would have happened anyway. And across every category, the electrician is the specifier — for concealed wiring the homeowner never sees the coil — so counter schemes work best synchronised with electrician loyalty programs that reward the same unit twice: once at the counter, once at the site.

• Dealer — the authorised counter with a company account: buys from the distributor or branch, appears in the brand's ERP, receives price-list discounts, credit-note settlements and target letters. Usually a large shop with signage rights and multi-brand switchgear boards.
• Sub-dealer / retailer — the smaller electrical shop that buys from dealers or the wholesale market. In the wire trade "sub-dealer" is the standard word; brands use "retailer" for the same counter. They are the majority of India's 500,000+ electrical outlets and the tier where wire brand decisions actually happen — yet the company has zero invoice visibility of them.
• Distributor — holds depot-level stock, finances dealer credit, and administers primary schemes. Never the target of counter-level schemes.

Because sub-dealers are off-book, the only way to run schemes for them at scale is through serialised QR on the product itself — every coil scan simultaneously enrols, verifies and rewards a counter the brand had never met.

Budget-setting. Electrical brands typically hold retailer / sub-dealer scheme spend at 1–2% of secondary revenue on wires (thin margins force discipline) and 2.5–4% on switchgear and lighting (richer margins, more display spend). A common blend: 45% always-on QR/slab rewards, 20% festive windows, 15% trips and gold, 10% launches, 10% meets and displays. Pressure-test the numbers in the loyalty program cost calculator before announcing anything to the trade — schemes are easy to launch and reputation-expensive to withdraw.

Slab math worked example. A counter buys ₹1.8L/month of your wires. You want ₹2.5L. Design: ₹1.5L → 0.8% (₹1,200), ₹2.5L → 1.2% (₹3,000), ₹4L → 1.5% (₹6,000). Moving from ₹1.8L to ₹2.5L earns the counter ₹1,800 more on ₹70,000 incremental purchases — a 2.6% marginal rate. Given wire margins of 5–8%, that is a one-third boost to counter profitability on the incremental volume: strong enough to shift share, not rich enough to reward pooling. Sanity rule: marginal payout at each slab edge should sit between 2% and 6% for wires; above that, counters start borrowing bills from neighbours.

TDS 194R. Once any counter's cumulative benefits — UPI payouts, redeemed points, demo boards given free, gold, trips — cross ₹20,000 in a financial year, Section 194R requires 10% TDS. Collect PAN at enrolment, aggregate across every scheme (the counter that wins a trip has usually also earned scan rewards all year), and deduct before settlement. This is a compliance line item most spreadsheet-run schemes miss and most audits find.

Measurement. Primary billing tells you what dealers stocked; only scan and invoice data tells you what counters sold. Instrument the program on QR scans for coils, boxes and battens plus invoice OCR for drums and project billing, then manage four numbers: active counters %, counter-share of the wire wallet, switchgear/lighting attach-rate, and incremental lift vs matched non-enrolled counters. Structures, templates and payout patterns are detailed further on our retailer schemes and retailer incentives pages.